Field name | Mandatory? | Allowed values | Allowed special characters |
Minutes | Yes | 0-59 | * / , - |
Hours | Yes | 0-23 | * / , - |
Day of month | Yes | 1-31 | * / , - ? L W |
Month | Yes | 1-12 or JAN-DEC | * / , - |
Day of week | Yes | 0-6 or SUN-SAT | * / , - ? L # |
Year | No | 1970–2099 | * / , - |
In some uses of the CRON format there is also a seconds field at the beginning of the pattern
Special characters
Support for each special character depends on specific distributions and versions of cron
Asterisk ( * )
The asterisk indicates that the cron expression will match for all values of the field; e.g., using an asterisk in the 4th field (month) would indicate every month.
Slash ( / )
Slashes are used to describe increments of ranges. For example 3-59/15 in the 1st field (minutes) would indicate the 3rd minute of the hour and every 15 minutes thereafter. The form "*/..." is equivalent to the form "first-last/...", that is, an increment over the largest possible range of the field.
Percent ( % )
Percent-signs (%) in the command, unless escaped with backslash (\), will be changed into newline characters, and all data after the first % will be sent to the command as standard input.
Comma ( , )
Commas are used to separate items of a list. For example, using "MON,WED,FRI" in the 5th field (day of week) would mean Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
Hyphen ( - )
Hyphens are used to define ranges. For example, 2000-2010 would indicate every year between 2000 and 2010 CE inclusive.
L
'L' stands for "last". When used in the day-of-week field, it allows you to specify constructs such as "the last Friday" ("5L") of a given month. In the day-of-month field, it specifies the last day of the month.
W
The 'W' character is allowed for the day-of-month field. This character is used to specify the weekday (Monday-Friday) nearest the given day. As an example, if you were to specify "15W" as the value for the day-of-month field, the meaning is: "the nearest weekday to the 15th of the month". So if the 15th is a Saturday, the trigger will fire on Friday the 14th. If the 15th is a Sunday, the trigger will fire on Monday the 16th. If the 15th is a Tuesday, then it will fire on Tuesday the 15th. However if you specify "1W" as the value for day-of-month, and the 1st is a Saturday, the trigger will fire on Monday the 3rd, as it will not 'jump' over the boundary of a month's days. The 'W' character can be specified only when the day-of-month is a single day, not a range or list of days.
Hash ( # )
'#' is allowed for the day-of-week field, and must be followed by a number between one and five. It allows you to specify constructs such as "the second Friday" of a given month.
Question mark ( ? )
Note: Question mark is a non-standard character and exists only in some cron implementations. It is used instead of '*' for leaving either day-of-month or day-of-week blank.